When Donald Trump said recently that he had never heard of Lebanon's law banning contact with Israelis — and called it "crazy" — he was, for once, understating the problem. Khaled Abu Toameh's survey of Arab anti-normalization laws reveals something more systemic than a single quirky statute: a regional architecture of coercion designed to make ordinary human contact between Arabs and Jews literally criminal.
Lebanon's law, rooted in its 1955 Boycott Law and reinforced by the penal code, prohibits all economic, professional, cultural, and social relations between Lebanese nationals and Israeli citizens. Violators face prison terms of three to ten years with hard labor, plus fines and professional bans. The Lebanese president cannot attend a White House meeting with the Israeli prime minister without technically violating his own country's law.
Well, that is not quite true. It is possible for Israeli Maronite Christians to visit Lebanon through a circuitous route even though they are Israeli citizens. Lebanon's laws are aimed at Israeli Jews, not Israelis altogether. And Lebanon is the moderate case.
Iraq's parliament passed a law in 2022 — the "Criminalizing Normalization and Establishment of Relations with the Zionist Entity" — carrying life imprisonment or the death penalty for violations, including "supporting Zionist ideas via social media." One man was sentenced to life imprisonment for posting content supportive of Israel on Facebook, with Hebrew-language books and newspapers found in his home treated as additional evidence against him. Kuwait has comparable legislation backed by religious rulings that treat normalization as treason; a television personality recently received three years in prison for publicly calling for normal relations with Israel. Even Egypt, which has maintained a formal peace treaty with Israel for over forty years, retains a 1975 law authorizing the revocation of citizenship from anyone "qualified as Zionist" — a provision used to strip citizenship from Egyptians who marry Israelis.
The pattern across all these laws is identical: the offense is contact. What is being criminalized is the experience of encountering Jewish Israelis as human beings in ordinary life — as business partners, neighbors, fellow shoppers, or spouses. The laws do not target contact with Israeli Arab citizens, who live under the same government and carry the same passports. The operative category is Jewish Israelis and the method is dehumanization. The entire apparatus exists to prevent the moment when an Arab looks at a Jewish Israeli and sees a person.
Nowhere is this more visible than among the Palestinians, and nowhere has it been documented for longer.
The Palestinian case requires understanding what Oslo actually was. When Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 and formally recognized Israel's right to exist, the Western world exhaled. What it missed was that Arafat had already told his own audience what he was doing. In a speech broadcast on Jordanian television shortly before the signing, he invoked the PLO's 1974 Ten Point Program — the "phased plan" — by name, describing the agreement as a step toward establishing a national authority on whatever land could be obtained as a stage toward the ultimate liberation of all Palestinian territory. The phased plan, which has never been rescinded, describes each territorial acquisition as advancing the balance of power toward Israel's elimination. Oslo, in other words, was announced by its own architect as a tactic in a longer campaign, on the day he signed it.
This framing persisted in Palestinian leadership discourse through the Oslo years and beyond. A senior member of the Fatah Central Committee, speaking on official Syrian television in 2013 — two decades after Oslo — explained the logic with refreshing clarity: "The inspiring idea cannot be achieved all at once. In stages." Mahmoud Abbas, the man the international community designated as the moderate alternative to Hamas, has on his own presidential website a book he wrote titled "Zionism: Beginning and End," reprinted as recently as 2011, whose final paragraph declares that "both the Jews and us are its victims" and promises that "we and the Jews will guarantee its destruction." This is the two-state solution's chief Palestinian advocate.
The structural proof, however, lies not in speeches but in what the Palestinian Authority built during the Oslo period — and kept building, and continued building right up to October 7. A genuine peace process requires, at minimum, preparing a population to accept the legitimacy of the other side's existence. Israel did this. Israeli textbooks taught the Oslo framework. Israeli political leaders made the public case for Palestinian statehood. Throughout the 1990s, Israeli society debated, agonized, and in significant measure accepted the premise that a Palestinian state was both necessary and legitimate.
The anti-normalization enforcement ran in perfect parallel. In 2010, when Israeli entrepreneur Rami Levy opened supermarkets in mixed areas where Palestinians and Israelis could shop side by side at prices significantly lower than Palestinian markets, Fatah organized a boycott, took photographs of Palestinian customers, and recorded their license plates as a deterrent. When Levy opened a new mixed mall in Atarot in January 2019 — a $54 million project in which 35 percent of the stores were Palestinian-owned, built specifically to serve the 230,000 Arab residents of northern Jerusalem who had no comparable shopping facility nearby — Fatah declared that any Palestinian who shopped there was committing "a betrayal of the homeland." The mall opened with 100 percent occupancy, applied immediately for a permit to add a third floor to meet excess tenant demand, and Palestinians shopped there anyway, in large numbers, because their families needed affordable groceries more than they needed ideological compliance. The enforcement failed on the ground. What it succeeded in was signaling, at the leadership level, that ordinary human commerce between Jews and Arabs — commerce actively desired by the Arab population it was meant to deter — was to be treated as treason.
Arab leaders are fearful that if their people see Israeli Jews as normal people, they may lose control of the dehumanization narrative that they use to keep the people in check. If they truly thought Zionism was a corrupt political philosophy, they would combat it ideologically; it is only fear that makes them want to criminalize any contact with Israeli Jews.
Abu Toameh ends his piece with a line worth taking at face value: where peace is illegal, peace is impossible. The Palestinian Authority proved the corollary. Where a people is systematically conditioned, from childhood, to regard Jews as subhuman enemies whose elimination is both politically necessary and religiously meritorious, no diplomatic agreement signed by their leaders will produce peace — because the agreement was never the point. The phased plan said so explicitly. The textbooks said so daily. The parking lot surveillance at the Rami Levy supermarket said so in the only language that leaves no ambiguity: they were so afraid of Palestinians seeing Jews as human beings that they photographed license plates to stop it.
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